A comprehensive exploration of dystopian literature, from the hypothetical futures in Western classics such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the historical reality of writers from Eastern and Central Europe.

In Dystopian Fiction East and West Erika Gottlieb offers an original and comprehensive exploration of dystopian fiction. She discusses Western classics such as Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Zamiatin's We, all fictions that project expanded versions of the flaws of current society onto a hypothetical monster state in the future. These fictions work as prophetic warnings against a nightmare world that could, but should not be allowed to, come about.

Gottlieb juxtaposes the Western dystopian genre with Eastern and Central European versions, introducing a selection of works from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. She demonstrates that authors who write about and under totalitarian dictatorship find the worst of all possible worlds not in a hypothetical future but in the historical reality of the writer's present or recent past. Against such a background the writer assumes the role of witness, protesting against a nightmare world that is but should not be. She introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others, all well-known in their own countries, presenting them within a framework established through an original and comprehensive exploration of the patterns underlying the more familiar Western works of dystopian fiction.

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"Dystopian Fiction East and West is thorough, meticulous, and insightful - in short, first-class scholarship. Gottlieb's chapter on "Kafka's Ghost" is a gem, and the concluding essay is a comprehensive analysis of dystopian literary criticism, coupled with a sober estimate of the future of dystopian thought. Gottlieb's expertness in this field is astounding, and she brings several important writers to the forefront who deserve to be better known outside their homelands. She conveys the suffering of people in the twentieth century without capitulating to ideology or wallowing in cynicism. Her book is a masterpiece." Dennis Rohatyn, Department of Philosophy, University of San Diego"Dystopian Fiction East and West is a major asset in the field of utopian/dystopian studies, as well as an excellent introduction to an important aspect of recent East European political and literary activity. It is the kind of study that utopian/dystopian scholars should keep on their shelves for years to come." Arthur O. Lewis, professor emeritus of English, College of the Liberal Arts, The Pennsylvania State University

Erika Gottlieb has taught at various institutions including Seneca College, McGill, Concordia, and Ryerson Polytechnic Universities, and The Budapest University of the Elte. She is the author of The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of Despair or Faith in the Spirit of Man?

the central drama of the age of faith was the conflict between salvation and damnation by deity, in our secular modern age this drama has been transposed to a conflict between humanity's salvation or damnation by society in the historical arena. In the modern scenario salvation is represented as a just society governed by worthy representatives chosen by an enlightened people; damnation, by an unjust society, a degraded mob ruled by a power-crazed elite. Works dealing with the former describe the heaven or earthly paradise of utopia; those dealing with the latter portray the dictatorship of a hell on earth, the "worst of all possible worlds" of dystopia.

a casual reading of such classics of dystopian fiction as Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four will make it obvious that underlying this secular genre the concepts of heaven and hell are still clearly discernible. In fact, the post-Enlightenment author's vision of a collective hell for society is not that far removed from Dante's medieval dream-vision of Dis, the city of hell. As for the function of hell in the overall framework of The Divine Comedy, we should remember that the purpose of the narrator-protagonist's entire journey in hell is to serve him - and his readers - as a warning to avoid the sin that condemns the sinner to eternal damnation, and to pursue instead the ways up to heaven: Beatrice, who watches over Dante from above, sends to him Virgil, the voice of reason, to lead him out of the Forest of Error - the pain and confusion caused by his sinful state. Under Virgil's guidance the narrator-protagonist has the unparallelled privilege of travelling through the nine circles of hell unscathed in order to witness the endless suffering of all those who died as sinners. Beatrice makes Dante confront these horrors in order to warn him about the possible consequences of his own erring ways and thereby to encourage him not to end up in hell.

strategies of Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell are also significantly the strategies of warning. As readers we are made to contemplate Zamiatin's One State, Huxley's World State, and Orwell's Oceania, each a hellscape from which the inhabitants can no longer return, so that we realize what the flaws of our own society may lead to for the next generations unless we try to eradicate these flaws today.

correspondence between religious and secular concepts in dystopian fiction is still so strongly felt that, if we examine Nineteen Eighty-four closely as the prototype of the genre, twentieth-century dystopian fiction reveals the underlying structure of a morality play. Orwell's protagonist, a modern Everyman, struggles for his soul against a Bad Angel; he struggles for the dignity of the Spirit of Man against the dehumanizing forces of totalitarian dictatorship.

parallel could be carried further. While the medieval morality play implies that the fate of the human soul will be decided at the Last Judgement, the modern dystopian narrative puts the protagonist on an ultimate trial where his fate will be decided in confrontation with the Bad Angel in his secular incarnation as the Grand Inquisitor, high priest of the state religion and God-like ruler of totalitarian dictatorship. Given the injustice endemic to the "bad place," this decision will invariably be in the negative: in Zamiatin's We, D-503 is sentenced to lobotomy; John Savage in Brave New World to madness brought on by loneliness and ostracism; Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four to a transformation of the individual personality until it embraces all it abhors, a state worse than the effects of lobotomy. The sinister and irrevocable transformation of the protagonist represents the irrevocable damnation of his society. It is one of the most conspicuous features of the warning in these classics of dsytopian fiction that once we allow the totalitarian state to come to power, there will be no way back.

for the origin of the term "dystopia," we find it of comparatively recent coinage. In his 1946 preface to Brave New World Huxley still refers to the bad place as a utopia, using the term he felt stood for any speculative structure taking us to the future. It was only in 1952 that J.Max Patrick 1 recommended the distinction between the good place as "eutopia" and its opposite, the bad place, as "dystopia."

discussing a selection of Russian novels written since Stalin's death and critical of the Soviet regime's allegedly utopian purpose, Edith Clowes borrows Gary Morson's term of "meta-utopia" - that is, a work that is "positioned on the borders of the utopian tradition and yet mediates between a variety of utopian modes." To distinguish these books from what she sees as the far more limited scope of dystopian fiction, she argues that meta-utopia represents a "much greater challenge to current readers ? than dystopian novels do" because it "refers to a social consciousness involving social and cultural pluralism." By contrast, according to Clowes, dystopian novels advocate a "nostalgic revision of the past age" and "deconstruct utopian schemes, only to abandon the notion of a beneficial social imagination," thereby embodying a "nihilistic attitude toward both the present and the future, closing both off to a